San Jose State basketball

Here’s a short story I wrote for the Merc on the latest financial development at every-financially-strapped San Jose State.

The news is good and bad. Good: The university is helping bridge the expense gap created by the cost-of-attendance legislation. The bad: It’s a temporary bridge (as AD Gene Bleymaier explains below).

Other matters not covered in the short:

* Bleymaier said the Spartans are searching for other sources of revenue, with ticket sales and sponsorship at/near the top of the list. Of course, those are heavily dependent on the success of football and men’s basketball, and both are floundering.

* Bleymaier is slowly formulating a long-term football schedule that combines fat paychecks, winnable games and competitive matchups.

His formula:

1 big-money guarantee game per year (road)2 games against Group-of-5 teams (i.e., MAC, CUSA, AAC), with one home and one on the road1 FCS game (home)

It’s the best Saturday of the season for in-person viewing of NCAA tournament-bound teams. Unfortunately, junkies can’t catch ’em both.

Gonzaga, a potential No. 1 seed, makes its annual visit to Saint Mary’s while San Diego State, the best team in the Mountain West and a possible No. 7-8 seed, plays San Jose State. Both games are at 7 p.m., unfortunately.

But if you’re so inclined, it’s possible to see Cal-Stanford at 3:30 and then catch either the Zags or the Aztecs.

I expect the Cal-Stanford and Gonzaga-SMC rematches to be closer than the first meetings, but with the same end result:

* The Gaels will hold up for 37-38 minutes before Gonzaga’s frontline takes control in the final possessions. (Wiltjer, Karnowski and Sabonis were 13 of 19 from the field in the first game.)

* Cal will show better than it did against Stanford in Haas (10-point loss), but the reeling Cardinal has too much at stake to lose at home … or so you’d think.

* Oh, and San Jose State and SDSU won’t be close, just in case you were wondering.

Now that football is over (mostly) and conference play has kicked in, here’s the first installment of the local rankings.

The exercise is intended to be more than a ranking of six teams — that’s just the vehicle.

At heart, it’s a forum for assessment and comment on the Bay Area men’s teams that will appear weekly on the Hotline through the league tourneys. (I’m aiming for Wednesday publication, but don’t hold me to that.)

Thus far, it has been a largely uninspiring season on the hoops front: A handful of horrific losses and only one team in serious at-large contention (Stanford), with two currently off the bubble but hoping to scramble back on (Saint Mary’s and Cal).

In my view, it’s futile for both the Bears and the Gaels — they have too far to climb and too little margin for error. But hey, maybe that’s just me being cynical.

If you’re unfamiliar, the APR measures retention and eligibility, with each player receiving a max of two points (one for retention, one for eligibility) for each semester.

Schools get rewarded for keeping players in school and on track to graduate. Penalties (scholarship reductions, postseason bans) are assessed for poor multi-year scores.

The multi-year scores noted below cover 2009-10, 2010-11, 2011-12 and 2012-13 school years.

*** Cal football, as was reported last week, is recovering from three years of embarrassing results. The Bears have a single-year total of 969 and a multi-year of 938, which keeps them out of the penalty box.

It’s only three points higher than the multi-year posted last spring because the score that dropped out of the calculation was a 959.

Cal’s issue remain the 934-926-923 scores, which will begin to drop out next year.

San Jose State officially became a member of the Mountain West Conference today: July 1, 2013.

We’ve known the move was coming for 14 months, and yet it feels momentous nonetheless.

That significance is partly a function of where SJSU is headed — into a stable, lucrative league with the likes of Boise State, San Diego State and Fresno State — and partly a function of the unpalatable alternatives:

If the Spartans hadn’t been accepted into the MWC, they would have been forced to eliminate football, exist as an Independent for at least a year, or drop down to the Football Championship Subdivision.

Consider the fate of the two longstanding Western Athletic Conference schools that were not invited into the Mountain West: